American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary. Scott MacDonald
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sculpture,” Fulton’s film provides a cinematic experience as far from the conventional as the Carpenter Center is from the Harvard buildings that surround it. Indeed, the experience of Reality’s Invisible often verges on the overwhelming; it combines myriad kinds of imagery and approaches to shooting with dizzying editing to provide a phantasmagoria of life in and around the building and a paean to unbounded cinematic freedom (fig. 11). Reality’s Invisible has the celebratory energy of Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) but without the structure provided by that City Symphony’s composite day—though as Reality’s Invisible unfolds, we do begin to recognize a variety of motifs in addition to the Carpenter Center building itself: particular individuals (including Robert Gardner), kinds of activities, editing rhythms.
Fulton begins the film with a series of brief shots—in a small stream with light flickering on the surface, a flattened Budweiser can floats by; this is followed by several flecks of light, then by a lovely color shot of sunrise; then a brief passage of light flickering through a woods, apparently filmed (in black and white) from a moving vehicle—and with this halting statement, spoken by Fulton himself: “I just feel like there’s a lot that I have to say, and I haven’t been able to say it yet. And it won’t be . . . and I don’t want to write it, because I’m . . . and I try to paint it, but maybe I could, maybe I could film it” (“could film it” is matched with the flickering light through the trees). Again, as in Path of Cessation, Fulton signals that this is the “morning” of his personal filmmaking.
Fulton’s montage in Reality’s Invisible combines three forms of dense editing. First, any particular strand of visual investigation tends to be made up of constant shifts in subject and method—and often includes wildly unpredictable camera movements as well as analogously edited sound. Second, Fulton works with a variety of forms of split screen. In a good many instances the film frame is divided into four separate images (and sometimes into three or two), within each of which a different image is visible; sometimes, the imagery in one or more of these inner frames is heavily edited. There are also instances where a single frame-within-the-frame is revealing one activity, while the full-frame image around the frame-within-the-frame is revealing another.
Third, Reality’s Invisible is full of multilayered imagery: we are regularly seeing one image and one kind of image through others. Fulton uses more, and more complex, layers of superimposition than any other filmmaker I am aware of, with the possible exception of Brakhage, whose Dog Star Man (1964) seems a particularly important influence on Fulton. Since each layer of Fulton’s superimposition is made up of quickly shifting imagery, or is interrupted by split screen imagery of one design or another, the effect of Reality’s Invisible is something like a cine-kaleidoscope. To use a phrase of one of the students, Fulton’s epic celebration of the Carpenter Center is a form of “serious playing around”: it reflects on and embodies the high-spirited, deeply serious work and play that the building represents to him.
Reality’s Invisible includes on-the-street sync-sound interviews with students in, around, and passing by the Carpenter Center, many of whom question Fulton about what he is doing (in one instance we hear a student say, “Reality’s invisible”); and statements by men and women who were teaching in the center or who had considerable connections with it, including then-young filmmakers Richard P. Rogers and Alfred Guzzetti, theorist Rudolf Arnheim, and Gardner, then director of the Carpenter Center, whose presence expands during the final section of the film. Sometimes, the faculty talk directly to Fulton; in other cases, we see them speaking to classes or offering individual students one-on-one critiques. Reality’s Invisible also documents a very wide range of art projects—in architecture, painting, drawing, sculpture, design, filmmaking—that were underway as Fulton was shooting; these include a variety of forms of experimental animation: passages of visuals and sounds scratched directly into dark leader, colorful sequences of imagery painted directly onto clear leader, cutout animation, “light writing” (that is, filming lights at night with a gestural camera so that streaks and curlicues of color fill the screen—it is unclear to me whether these sequences were filmmaking experiments that Fulton conducted himself or works by Carpenter Center students that he recycled into his film (my guess is the latter). And of course, the Carpenter Center itself is featured as an artwork; Fulton visually explores and documents every facet of the building, seemingly in every way he can think of.
The soundtrack is analogous to the image track, a mix of sync-sound statements by individuals, moments of silence, and passages of music, especially jazz (Fulton features jazz saxophone played by a musician we see several times during the film). In several instances the combination of freeform jazz and Fulton’s wild montage results in a kind of freeform “visual music.” And from time to time, Fulton includes sequences of several different speakers saying bits of what become constructed meta-statements: for example, a series of voices say “gradual narrowing down”/“two-dimensional experience”/“no continuity, no connection”/“live with it”/“my image”/“just exploded.” These meta-statements are prescient of language experiments that Abigail Child would include in her multipartite Is This What You Were Born For? (1981–89).36
From time to time we hear Fulton speaking behind the camera. When one young man asks what kind of picture is going to be on the screen when Fulton is done with his film, Fulton replies, “You tell me”; and when a young woman asks, “Can you tell me anything more about this?,” Fulton says, “Not much.” And in a few instances we hear Fulton in voice-over, presumably commenting on the filmmaking process he’s involved in: “Correlating what you see with what you do with your hands. Considering what’s important and what isn’t. Flowing with the movement of the universe as opposed to against it. All the natural movements. You can’t talk about a beginning because everything is circular, but all those things interrelate. It doesn’t begin without any of those.” In his editing, Fulton does maximize “flow”; indeed he positions his exploration of the Carpenter Center and those who are studying and working there within a much larger context, so that their activities are seen as part of “the movement of the universe.” Not only does Fulton include views of the larger Harvard campus, including the green areas that lie near the Carpenter Center, but in frequent instances he embeds his imagery of art and artists within a much broader panorama: he films mountains from a plane; there are frequent shots of a woods, and of ocean surf, and imagery of a stream running, and of a field of grain. What goes on in this center of artistic creativity is seen as an extension of the larger world of natural forces.
One can hope that Reality’s Invisible—and Fulton’s work in general—will become more widely known and appreciated. At the moment, the film exists in a single 16mm print housed at the Harvard Film Archive. Fortunately, it is also available, in a reasonably good version, as part of a discussion with Robert Gardner in April 1973 that was recorded for a new television experiment, Screening Room.
SCREENING ROOM: MIDNIGHT MOVIES
In the late 1960s, Gardner was part of a group of Boston area businessmen and educators who took over Boston’s channel 5, an ABC affiliate, in order to offer the region a more educationally engaging alternative to standard television programming. After the takeover, Gardner initiated and hosted the long-running interview show, Screening Room, which presented films by independent filmmakers, contextualized by discussions with the filmmakers (and sometimes visiting scholars). The first Screening Room episode was an interview with John Whitney Sr., aired in November 1972; the series lasted until 1981. Around a hundred episodes were aired, and thirty of them are currently available on DVD from Studio7Arts. Screening Room was dedicated to a reasonably wide range of independent cinema; and Gardner’s selection of Screening Room programs for the original Documentary Educational Resources release reflected this: included were independent and experimental animators Robert Breer, George Griffin, Faith and John Hubley, Derek Lamb, Caroline Leaf and Mary Beams, Jan Lenica, Suzan Pitt; documentarians Les Blank, Emile de Antonio, Hillary Harris, Ricky Leacock, Alan Lomax, Richard P. Rogers, and Jean Rouch; and a range of avant-garde filmmakers: Bruce Baillie, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Ed Emshwiller, Hollis Frampton, Robert Fulton, Peter Hutton, Standish Lawder, Jonas Mekas, Yvonne Rainer, and Michael Snow.37 Each Screening Room episode intercuts between the presentation of short films or excerpts from longer films and Gardner and the filmmaker (and sometimes